WordPress: Add widgets to your site

Widgets are little sidebars or blocks that enhance your site, making it more dynamic and customized. I have 3 widgets on my homepage of this course site: the Mac OS shortcuts image, a tag cloud, and the Twitter feed from @PolitiFact.

[Update: I now have 4 widgets — I added the Quarantine Party playlist from Spotify after helping the morning class troubleshoot how to do it. If you want to learn how to embed a playlist, head over to this page.]

But there are dozens more possibilities. You can add as many widgets to your site as you want (keeping in mind that the maximum amount of points you can receive from WordPress enhancements in this unit is 25).

These might include:

social media streams (like Instagram or Twitter)

tag clouds (for this option to make sense, you would need to have tagged all of your posts)

images, videos, texts, or audio clips

something else

For this task, I’m going to direct you to LinkedIn Learning (LiL for short), a site I mentioned in Unit 1. LiL is one of the consistently great resources you can use at Rowan, producing high-quality, video-based tutorials that the university pays a fee to subscribe to. The fact that you can have a free account to this site is a perk of being a student here. To use LiL, log in to the site via the Rowan portal.

Once you’re in, you can search for different videos, courses, and other content. The course you’ll be visiting is “WordPress.com Essential Training,” specifically the tutorial under the Section 7: Customize Your Site, titled “Use Widgets.”